The Caixin-Sinica Business Brief, episode 42

Kaiser KuoMarch 26, 2018Comments Off on The Caixin-Sinica Business Brief, episode 42

Welcome to the 42nd installment of the Caixin-Sinica Business Brief, a weekly podcast that brings you the most important business stories of the week from China’s top source for business and financial news. Produced by Kaiser Kuo of our Sinica Podcast, it features a business news roundup, plus conversations with Caixin reporters and editors.

This week, we note that China’s legislature elected Yang Xiaodu 杨晓渡, a veteran leader of a Party-based anti-graft organ, as the first chief of the country’s newly formed anti-corruption agency created under President Xi Jinping’s effort to extend his battle against corruption. We explore the launch of car-hailing services by Meituan-Dianping, one of China’s largest online services platforms. We dive deep into China’s new efforts to tighten regulations on online videos by calling for local governments to scrub from the web parodies and adaptations that are based on copyrighted content. We hear that profit for Tencent’s online publishing unit, China Literature, grew 15-fold last year compared with the previous year. We learn the news that 10 Chinese smartphone makers have vowed to join forces to challenge the growing dominance of WeChat — China’s largest social media platform — by creating something called Quick App. We discuss the potential of U.S-listed tech giants Alibaba and JD.com becoming the first companies to make secondary listings on the mainland through the issue of so-called China Depositary Receipts (CDRs).

In addition, we talk with Doug Young, managing editor of Caixin Global, about the latest news on the tariff situation between the U.S. and China, and Tencent’s biggest shareholder, Naspers, cutting its stake in the company. We also chat with Caixin reporter Poornima Weerasekara about the controversy over China’s building of a hydropower dam.

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Blaming China

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Jeremy and Kaiser are joined by Benjamin Shobert, who visited the Sinica South studio in Durham, North Carolina, for this episode. He is a senior manager at Healthcare NExT, a healthcare initiative of Microsoft, and leads strategy with national governments. The topic of discussion is his compelling book, Blaming China: It Might Feel Good but It Won’t Fix America’s Economy. The three discuss the taxonomy of dragon slayers and panda huggers, and some realities with which the world is now grappling: the rise of China, outcomes of globalization, the watershed moment of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the impact it has had — and will continue to have — on the bilateral relationship between the United States and China.

Photo of the Day

A worker waters the flowers and plants in front of the local government building in Qingdao, Shandong Province, on the October 1 National Day. In the background, the Chinese propaganda characters can be translated as “[Xi Jinping] Thought on Socialism With Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” and “Striving for the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Dream.”